Videos Send Viewers to Facebook Pages

Brand sites are second-most-common destination

Spending on online video ads is growing quickly, and marketers are finding the ads good for branding, typically sending viewers who show interest to the brand’s owned media properties.

According to research from opt-in video platform Jun Group, a visit to a brand’s Facebook page was the most common action taken after watching an online video ad, at least for US viewers watching an opt-in ad from a Fortune 500 brand. Clicking through to a site followed close behind.

Overall, engagement rates with video ads hovered between just under 3% and 4.5%, with videos between 30 and 60 seconds long performing best. Videos both shorter and longer than that sweet spot had lower engagement rates, though the shortest videos had the highest completion rates.

Jun Group found women were slightly more likely to complete video ads than men, at 3.31% vs. 3.17%, while the youngest internet users and the oldest internet users had the highest completion rates overall, at 3.44% among 12- to 17-year-olds and 4.35% among those 55 and up.

Other research has found the length of the content that advertisements are paired with can have more of an effect on video completion and interaction rates than the length of video ads themselves. FreeWheel found that long-form content of 20 minutes or more had video ad completion rates of 91% among US-based audiences in Q2 2012, compared with 80% for midlength content and 69% for videos 5 minutes long or shorter. VINDICO similarly found 91% completion rates among the US audience when video appeared with long content, vs. 73% completion for short content.